Current Build-time Dependencies for Ardour

Libraries Requiring Modified Versions

The binary ("ready to run") versions of Ardour available on
ardour.org are built using modified versions of recent releases of
the following libraries. These modifications are required for
building and running Ardour. To comply with the license that they
(and Ardour) use, we make modified releases of them available. The
patches used to create them can be found in Ardour's repository
at git.ardour.org

How do these versions differ?

The changes to the libraries listed above are relatively minor but
important for the smooth operation of Ardour and/or packaging it
as a binary bundle. You could build a functioning version of Ardour
with the normal releases of thes libraries if you chose to do so.

libsigc++

patched to fix compilation on OS X caused by Apple's use of macros
like NULL

On OS X, contains several patches need to make GTK+ function
correctly for Ardour. Some of these changes break the GTK+ ABI, and
so will never be accepted for the GTK+ 2.x releases.

On both Linux and OS X, contains a patch to allow GTK+ to be fully
relocatable. You do NOT need this version of GTK+ on Linux
unless you intend to try to build your own binary bundles of
Ardour.

The modified version of GTK+ must be built with
the --enable-relocation argument given to the
configure command.

lrdf

No patches, just a "make dist"-generated tarball of a recent
version of LRDF from git, since a new version has not been released
in some time.

Freetype

Ardour is currently built using Freetype 2.4.9
plus this
patch. The patch turns off the bytecode interpreter which
Ardour's lead developer thinks produces nicer font rendering. The
patch not actually required on Linux systems, and is irrelevant on
non-Linux systems (since Freetype is not used to render fonts there).

At the present time, there appears to be no way
for a 3rd party to repackage Freetype into a source tarball. The
maintainers of the library have been notified of this issue.

GTK Stack

Ardour requires GTK+ 2.24 or later. Building or installing this
library will require/bring in several other libraries that Ardour
also requires. Note that we use a modified version of GTK (see above).